Ten Days of Terror!: Darkness

Film: Darkness
Format: DVD from River Valley District Library through interlibrary loan on rockin’ flatscreen.

One of the joys of watching horror movies from the past is that you can sometimes see someone at the start of his or her career. Think Johnny Depp in A Nightmare on Elm Street, for instance, or perhaps Kevin Bacon in Friday the 13th. It’s a lot more fun when it’s someone who ends up with a great career but appeared in some terrible early horror films—Mila Kunis in American Psycho II, for instance. So when an odd little horror movie has an established cast, I find it fascinating. Darkness, a relatively unknown film from 2002 has a surprising cast, and these are not unknowns. Featured in this film are Anna Paquin, who had won an Oscar a decade previous; Lena Olin, Oscar nominated in the previous decade; and Giancarlo Giannini, nominated back in 1975. An Oscar winner and two nominees in an unknown, amateurish horror film. That’s pretty exceptional.

It took me longer to get this film than I would have liked. I ordered it through interlibrary loan and was sent the wrong film. Instead of Darkness from 2002, I was sent The Darkness from 2016. Oh, those wacky librarians!

Wednesday Horror: [•REC]

Film: [•REC]
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

Found footage is a hard sell for me. While I think it’s possible to tell a good story in the found footage style, I think a lot of times the style gets in the way of the story being told. With [•REC] (or [REC], [Rec] or simply REC) we have film that is doubly controversial. It’s found footage, something that doesn’t always work. It’s also a film that hits that zombie/non-zombie dividing line. Are we looking at a zombie apocalypse or is this a 28 Days Later-style infection?

Regardless, it’s not difficult to see where [•REC] takes its inspiration: zombie movies and zombie-inspired movies like the aforementioned 28 Days Later. It’s also clearly inspired by the sort of television magazine show that feature a reporter and camera operator going on location for local interest stories. That’s the case here, with our television presenter Angela Vidal (real-life television presenter Manuela Velasco) and her cameraman Pablo (Pablo Rosso) going on location to a local firehouse to see what a typical night is like for the firefighters.